6/22/2009 @ 6:00AM

The Art Of Visual Communication

Every manager has thought about it: Put in a worldwide videoconferencing system, allow customers to patch in via their desktop computers and tighten communication across the company.

The benefits are obvious enough. Employees don’t waste time in transit, they’re more productive because their bodies aren’t stuck in a different time zone, and their work-life balance is emphatically better. But does it work? And what do you need to watch out for?

Forbes caught up with Nectarios Lazaris, CIO of global architectural firm Woods Bagot, to talk about the pros and cons of enterprise-wide videoconferencing.

Forbes: What was the motivation behind your videoconferencing system?

Lazaris: We’re a global architectural firm, and the way we operate is through what we call, “one global studio.” We’re not like other practices, where someone in the New York office doesn’t know someone else in the Chicago office. We leverage our skill pool globally. That’s our differentiator. We have experts from Dubai, Sydney and San Francisco working on a very large development in the Middle East. We wanted to make sure that when we met a client face-to-face, the other studios were involved in the conversation. That way we could ensure the client that the “A team” was working on it.

How many employees are in your firm?

We have 900 employees globally. On this one project alone, we had people flying either from the West Coast of America or Sydney to Dubai once a week.

That must have affected productivity, right?

Yes, it did. We had people on the plane nonstop. It was a horrendous air bill.

How big?

It was a six-figure number. Airfare is not cheap, and hotels in Dubai are not cheap, either. On top of that, you lose the time your employees are in the air; they’re jet-lagged; they lose time with their families. Work-life balance was terrible. We deployed this as a trial in San Francisco, Dubai and Sydney, and we added document cameras hanging off the ceiling.

What’s a document camera?

It’s a camera that allows you to project a drawing. So one office could put out a drawing on the boardroom table and the other studios could mark up the drawings.

The resolution is that fine?

Yes. It’s so good that you can read the fine print on a U.S. dollar note. The clarity is amazing. That was our phase-one roll-out. It’s a big investment, so we did it in stages. We wanted proof of concept and we wanted to make sure that culturally, both in the company and with our clients, it would be accepted.

Was it?

Yes. It’s been a huge success. At the same time as we bought the small units, we also acquired some desktop units. We deployed them to all the studios where our board of directors are based. In our next board meeting, the CFO canceled a face-to-face meeting and used the videoconferencing system. It was such a success that they canceled all four [boards'] face-to-face board meetings for the year and increased them to once a month over videoconferencing. The savings for the first board meeting was $120,000 just for airfare.

What are the next phases and how many are there?

We’re installing phase two now. That allows our external clients to dial in via videoconferencing the same way you can use a desk phone, whether it’s from Tandberg to Tandberg or from our Microsoft Office desktop client.

What’s the ultimate goal?

Unified communication between our PBX and our videoconferencing units. Being a design firm, everything is visual. Writing a board report, whether it’s five or 50 pages, is absolutely pointless in a company like this. Designers don’t think in text. The end game for us is a unified visual collaborative platform.

So, real-time collaboration?

Yes, all the way to the desktop.

What gets lost in videoconferencing that you don’t get from face-to-face interaction?

The only thing that gets lost is people aren’t sitting in the same room. Other than that, it’s the same.

Does it matter if your clients don’t have the same system as you do?

No. When we first began looking at this, one of the considerations was that I didn’t want to be stuck with a Cisco solution for the rest of my life. I don’t want my clients feeling locked into Woods Bagot. I want them to want to collaborate with us.

What if the connectivity on one side is less than optimal?

We always accommodate for the worst-case scenario. You find out when you’re conducting business in the Middle East that their best-case scenario is our worst-case scenario. Connectivity is less than optimal.

What was the reaction from your employees? Were they hesitant or accepting?

It was a mix of both. But we are running the latest and greatest technology, so they were quite keen to use it. That was the challenge that concerned me the most–early adoption.

What do you need to run this from a technology perspective?

Bandwidth is very important. Our wide-area network allows us to have Internet connections in all of our studios. PacNet manages our routers and firewalls globally. Our WAN is built on the Internet with Cisco DMVPNs [dynamic multipoint virtual private networks]. We don’t have a private dedicated network. On top of that, we’ve Blue Coat ProxySGs and PacketShapers that do the acceleration and prioritization of our traffic.

With videoconferencing and collaboration, can you run your operation around the clock?

Yes. We are an almost follow-the-sun company. And we can push our response to the final minute. We know we’re not going to have someone watching a Facebook video. We have limited access to recreational traffic.

How about security?

All of our documentation is accessible to anyone, anywhere around the world. We always want to make sure our best work is available. The only time we put security on our design documents is when they involve defense work. Obviously financial information and board information needs to be secure.

Is latency a problem on your system?

Our worst ping time is from Sydney to London, and that’s purely because of the speed of light. It’s about 290 milliseconds.

But your network is only as good as your weakest link, though. What do you do in the Middle East?

We account for that with our Blue Coat technology. Without that, there’s no way we could get traffic in and out.

If you had to do it again, what would you do differently?

Tell the board to slow down and stop throwing money at me. Once they were committed and they saw what we were achieving, it was a question of “what’s next, what’s next?” The industry we’re in is very reactive. We have to ensure we’re the first to go to market.